Their Literary Presence and Ancestral Past

Marion Kraft

Starting from the principle of the African continuum and based on concepts of an afrocentric feminist epistemology, this study traces back African cultural traditions and narrative strategies in works by African American women writers. It examines the inscription of the Black woman's voice into the Western text and analyses conceptions of female bonding, flexible gender roles, matrilineal myths and legends, trickster figures, folktales, tonal language and double-voiced structures of address as constituting elements in the development of a specific literary canon of women writers of the African diaspora in the USA. Focusing on these textual politics, the study aims at contributing to the ongoing discourse on Black feminist aesthetics.

Publication History:

Fragments of History, Fragments of Self

Trudier Harris and Jennifer Larson

Contemporary African American dramatists such as Amiri Baraka, James Baldwin, August Wilson, and Suzan-Lori Parks as well as Lorraine Hansberry, Alice Childress, and Pearl Cleage find their creative inspiration in historical events from slavery to the civil rights movement. From the Emmett Till-inspired character in Baldwin’s
Blues for Mister Charlie to Parks’s recreation of Lincoln and Booth, these playwrights show that history is the mirror that shapes the identities of African American writers and characters.

Series:

. Impelling into their minds any import of pre-­American history (and thus ideas of an Africancontinuumand civilizational contribution) is not going to make any difference in their immediate impoverished lives. Nineteenth-­century European-­Americanwriters construed that AfricanAmericans were incurable of their civilizational deprivation since they have never had the intellectual capability and must learn from the already long-­experienced European American. They must work hard and attempt to scale the mountain of civilization from the very bottom position that they

Nathaniel Norment, Jr.

Series:

, Barbara Smith, Sonia Sanchez, Patricia Bell Scott, June
Jordan, Audre Lorde, Patricia Hill Collins, and bell hooks brought issues of race, sex, gender, class, and
sexual orientation which concerned the Black Women’s movement51 to the forefront of discussion in
Black Studies. Later, the emergence of Black Women’s Studies52 as an academic discipline generated a
dialogue within AfricanAmerican Studies that resulted in challenging the existing epistemologies53 that
did not incorporate the significant presence and contributions of AfricanAmericanwomen in the dis

Nathaniel Norment, Jr.

Series:

Women’s movement 51 to the forefront of discussion in Black Studies. Later, the emergence of Black Women’s Studies 52 as an academic discipline generated a dialogue within AfricanAmerican Studies that resulted in challenging the existing epistemologies 53 that did not incorporate the significant presence and contributions of AfricanAmericanwomen in the discipline. AfricanAmericanWomen’s Studies also began to assert itself simultaneously inside and outside of AfricanAmerican Studies. Research and writing by Black women which had been previously rejected and

Series:

History of Black Women in
America (1998), and Black Women in America, Historical Encyclopedia Volumes I, II, III, coedited with
Elsa Barkley Brown (2005). She also edited, in 1990, Three Essays: Black Studies in the United States (The
Ford Foundation). Her seminal textbook TheAfrican-American Odyssey (1999) is widely used.
Dr. John W. Blassingame (1940–2000)
Dr. Blassingame was an AfricanAmerican scholar, historian, educator, writer, and leading pioneer in
the study of American slavery. He was a key participant in some of the earliest debates and dialogues
about